A solution to the my problem of marking family members for Copy Fact

I have complained rather too much about how hard I find marking people when using the new Copy Fact tool. I have found a solution that surely sounds incredibly convoluted in theory but which seems to be very easy to use in practice.

My use case is that I enter a Census fact for the head of household. This Census fact is complete with date, place, citation, media, and a note with the transcription of the entire census entry for the whole family. Then I use the Copy Fact tool to copy the fact to the other family members who were enumerated in the same household. Finally, I go to the note for the newly copied Census fact for each family member and customize the note just for them.

So far, so good. It’s a pretty manual and tedious process. But I’m willing to go to the extra trouble to make the Census facts look the way I want them to look in narrative reports. And using the Copy Fact tool takes care of getting the citation and media set up properly for each family member automatically after first getting the information set up properly for the head of household.

I find my process to be very nice, except for the part where I have to select the people who are to receive the copy of the Census fact. I have written at great length about why I find this to be such a difficult process, and I won’t repeat all of those comments again. Rather, I will simply describe my procedure.

  • I have a Saved Search called ! that’s always there that simply searches based on who is in a group called ! which is not usually there. The group does have to exist at least temporarily when I first create the Saved Search. The Saved Search name and the group name are deliberately very short and use a character which sorts to the top of the list of Saved Searches and groups.
  • When I am about to copy a Census fact, I create a group called ! as a simple group. I then go to the Edit Person for each person in the census entry and make them members of the ! group. This is the key thing that’s really easy to do to in this procedure to indicate who is to receive the copied Census fact. As I have written, it is seldom everyone in the family who is in the current census entry, and census entries are often multi-generational - like with grandparents and/or grandchildren.
  • When I am in the Copy Fact dialog, I do a Mark based on ! as a Saved Search name. the Mark process for the Copy Fact dialog supports Saved Search names but it does not support group names. That’s the reason for the bizarre procedure of having a Saved Search named ! and a group with the same name. It’s like I’m using the Saved Search which is supported by Mark to launder the use of the group which is not supported by Mark.
  • I delete the group ! so as not to confuse anything for the next time I need to copy a Census fact, but I can leave the Saved Search named ! to be used again.

So I finally figured out a workaround for the problem and I’m a pretty happy camper. But surely there could be a much simpler and more natural way to select family members who are to receive a copied Census fact.

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Rather a brilliantly simple work around – although not sure why when RM already knows parent , siblings , spouses and other close family members the couldn’t be a simply check box screen to add them quickly. (Based of something similar to the Family screen from index.)

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Interesting idea creating a Group.

My approach is to have Family View showing, then in the case of a Census, I enter info for the “Head” person. Sliding the Edit window over a bit to see the Family View.
Copy Fact>Mark>Families>As Parent … Now the family is selected.

I can see the family with their RINs. If someone should not be included in the Copy, I enter the RIN into the Search box and uncheck them.

May not be the cleanest way but for now it works for me and I don’t mind extra steps. I don’t want Bruce to do everything for me LOL

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This was Renee’s suggestion as well, and I know how to do it. But for me personally, it doesn’t work well at all. For one thing, I have too many multi-generational families. For another thing, I find it way too easy to forget to unmark the ones to be unmarked and far too hard to find the ones that need that need to be unmarked.

For example, what if I have family with 8 children of whom only 2 were born before the 1850 census. When I’m working on the 1850 census, that leaves 6 to unmark. I have to put each one of the 6 into the search box, 6 separate times. I can’t do the marking and unmarking on the right hand side of the RM Explorer screen where I can see the family unit. I have to do the marking and unmarkng on the left side of the RM Explorer screen where I cannot see the family unit.

By the way, I do not want the existing functionality to go away. I have copied a fact to thousands of people all at the same time. So the existing functionality is needed. But most of my use of Copy Fact is for Census facts where I need to be able to mark within a family unit.

If that works for you great. I was just adding mine in case someone wanted to know another way.

Fortunately, I don’t need to use Copy until the 1960 Census comes out as I’ve already completed the earlier ones, prior to Copy being available.

Wow, that’s very impressive. Congratulations! :grinning:

I fear that I have so many census entries I need to enter that I shall never get them all caught up. When the 1940 census first became available, my goal was to find and enter all of them into RM before the 1950 census became available. I didn’t come even close to meeting my goal for 1940, and I still haven’t.

I just share the census fact. I’m won’t go through the process here, click-by-click, but what I will say is that sharing lets me specify the role of each family member (son, daughter, etc) and on the same screen I can write a different note for each person receiving the shared fact. I don’t have to separately reproduce sources and media as these come across automatically, as does the basic info of date, place, etc. It seems to work well enough for me, but perhaps I’m missing something here. Would it be better to use Copy Fact instead of Share?

I think what you are doing is fine, and it’s a very nice way to use RM. Indeed, it is using RM’s shared roles feature to its maximum advantage.

The reason I chose not do the same thing originally was that the shared census roles could not be transferred to FamilySearch or to Ancestry. I later discovered other software which could not import RM’s shared roles. Some software does import RM’s shared roles, but not all.

I wanted to submit a minor correction or addendum to my method. Instead of creating and deleting a simple group called !, it’s better to have a rules group called ! that I never delete. The rule for the group is that it should contain nobody. That must be the strangest group that’s imaginable.

Just because it’s a rules group does not prevent me from adding people manually to the ! group using the Edit Person screen. Then the marking using the ! Saved Search works as before. But instead of deleting the ! group after using it during marking, I refresh it. That has the practical effect of emptying it out while leaving it still in existence for further use. That seems to work better than deleting the ! group and redefining the ! group each time I use it.

Also, I am discovering more uses for the Copy Fact tool than just for copying Census facts. If there is a general rule than can be used for a particular use of the Copy Fact tool, then what’s what I do. But if there is not a general rule and if I need to select some family members and not others, then I can use my ! group and my ! Saved search together no matter the fact being copied. It does not have to be the Census fact.

Even though I now have a workaround that works well for me, I would still very much prefer it if the Copy Fact tool provided an easy to use way to mark some family members to receive the copied fact and not other family members.

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Completely agree. The Family view with checkboxes (like kevync1985 suggested), AND a copy’n’paste keystroke or simple menu item where you can memorize (copy) the fact, and paste/reuse it into a new person (a simpler version of memorize citation).

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